It's never too early to make a bad impression.
A cover letter
or introductory email is often the first thing a potential employer sees
when reviewing a job applicant. It's the first opportunity to impress
recruiters and hiring managers and, therefore, the first opportunity to
disappoint them. Everything from copy mistakes to inappropriate jokes in
a cover letter could derail an application.
Here are the top ten worst things to put on a cover letter:
(click below to read more)
1. Next to Nothing
While
writing something that's too long is a common cover letter mistake,
what can be even more damaging is a cover letter that's too short.
Bruce
Hurwitz, President of Hurwitz Strategic Staffing, Ltd., a New
York-based staffing firm recalls a cover letter he received a few months
ago for an entry-level IT sales position. It read simply, "Here's my
resume. Call me. [Phone number]."
"I cracked up," Hurwitz says. "This person had only just graduated with a Bachelor's degree. It was ridiculous."
A
good cover letter should be somewhere between 200 to 250 words, Hurwitz
says, and should answer the question of why a recruiter should look at
the resume. "The key is to highlight one success," Hurwitz says. "For
example, 'I successfully increased sales 500% over two years, resulting
in increased, sustained revenue of $25 million.' Once I read that, I
look at the resume."
2. Criticism of a Prospective Employer
Thumbtack.com,
a San Francisco-based site that connects customers with small business
services, asked potential employees to submit in their cover letters
feedback about their website. One candidate, a contender for an
entry-level position in April, didn't pull any punches.
"The
engineering of your site looks lazy and ineffective," the applicant
wrote, proceeding to describe the color scheme of the site as
"disconcerting to my eyes."
Needless to say, he was not considered
for the position, though not before the hiring manager got in some
laughs around the water cooler at his expense.
"We forwarded the
cover letter to our managers sort of as a joke," says Sander Daniels,
co-founder of the site. "It was the most caustic feedback we received.
But we responded kindly to him -- we didn't suggest any improvements to
him in approaching other employers. We don't see it as our role to
counsel failed candidates."
Daniels observed that while many
strong candidates turn in well-written cover letters, some have let the
demand for engineers get to their heads, as Silicon Valley romances them
with six-figure salaries and other job perks.
"Maybe they think
they can get away with it -- but in our company, culture is a very
important factor." Daniels says. "Even if Facebook's best engineer came
to us, we wouldn't hire him if he was a jerk."
3. Personal Stories
While
employers are sometimes interested in personal stories, especially if
they give some idea about work ethic, it's best to save these stories
for the interview, says Lindsay Olson of New York-based Paradigm
Staffing, who specializes in recruiting communications and marketing
professionals.
"I think my favorite of all time was the
salesperson who poetically told me about how he decided to run a
marathon, climbed to reach glaciers to have a taste of pure water, ran
at heights of 5,000 meters in Peru, and biked down the world's most
dangerous road and survived (over 300,000 have not)," says Olson, of a
candidate who was applying for a business development position at a
recruiting firm in June last year. "All this in his opening paragraph."
If
you are asked in an interview about your hobbies and adventures, be
prepared with a strong answer, says Olson. "What a [job candidate] likes
to do outside of work might show how they are in their job," she says.
"As a hiring manager, what you don't like to hear is, 'I just like to
sit around at home and read books all day.'"
4. Awkward Language
Rachel
Levy, director of marketing at Just Military Loans, a Wilmington,
Del.-based personal loan service for military personnel, got a letter
last week from a candidate who seemed to be expressing lukewarm interest
in an IT analyst position.
"My name is xxx. I am pretty interested in the IT analyst position at Just Military Loans," the letter began.
Levy
says she sees many applications, especially for IT jobs, to have
grammatical and other language flaws. "What I've noticed is that there
are a lot of people applying to these jobs, for whom English is a second
language," Levy says. "So the connotations of certain words and phrases
may not be clear to them. Which is fine, but they should get someone to
help word their intentions correctly."
In this case, Levy thinks
the applicant meant "very" instead of "pretty," but she'll never know
because that applicant didn't get an interview.
5. Someone Else's Words
Frank
Risalvato, a recruiting officer for Inter-Regional Executive Search
Inc., is deluged with cover letters from different candidates that all
obviously use the same template from the same career coaches.
"Some
of these [cover letters] we see are very obviously not written by the
individual," says Risalvato. "We get 15 to 20 of these a month, and it
sounds disingenuous and insincere, seeing these cover letters from
Seattle one week, Chicago another, and it's all the same style."
Some
career experts also warn against the tired stand-by opening lines in a
cover letter. "Opening a letter with a passive and clichéd statement
such as 'Enclosed please find my resume highlighting my experience and
skills that would help your company to grow and succeed,'" is a no-no,
says Ann Baehr, certified professional resume writer and president of
New York-based Best Resumes. "It's best to use something catchy and more
specific such as, "If your company could benefit from the expertise of a
hard-charging sales producer with a flawless record of success for
closing tier-one Fortune 500 prospects in the healthcare technology
market and capturing millions of dollars in revenue, please take a
moment to review the attached resume."
If you're uncomfortable
with that approach, make your cover letter unique to you with insights
about the company you're applying to, advises Darrell Gurney, Los
Angeles-based founder of career coaching site Careerguy.com and author
of Backdoor Job Search: Never Apply For A Job Again!.
"Put
in a note saying something like, 'I've been following your company's
progress in the last year and in February and I noticed your company was
mentioned in the Journal of such and such,'" Gurney says. "That's the
amazing thing about the Internet. You can spend 15 minutes online and
look like you've been following them for a year."
Gurney reminds applicants to do their full research on the company if they do get called in for an interview after.
6. Irrelevant Experience
As
noteworthy as an impressive Girl Scout cookies sales record may be,
it's not worth trumpeting that experience when trying to break into a
field like software sales. Rich DeMatteo, co-founder of
Philadelphia-based Social Media Marketing firm Bad Rhino, remembers a
candidate who did just that when he was working as a corporate recruiter
at a software company.
"I was recruiting for a software sales
position and one candidate was sure she was qualified because of her
success selling Girl Scout cookies when she was a young girl," DeMatteo
says. "I think she was young and didn't realize how important it is to
state the right experience. Younger applicants tend to reach for skills,
and try to find them anywhere in their life."
Some candidates take it even further, acknowledging they have no relevant skills, but pushing to be hired anyway.
"I
read one for an IT analyst position that says, 'Although my
qualifications do not exactly match your needs, the close proximity to
my home is a big bonus for me,'" Levy of Just Military Loans recalls.
"You have a lot of underqualified people just out of college just
throwing resumes at the wall, and hoping something sticks."
DeMatteo
suggests trying to focus on specifc sales figures or experience in
relevant projects. "A lot of sales, for instance, is numbers-based.
Stick to that."
7. Arrogance
It's one thing to promote yourself favorably in a cover letter, but watch that it doesn't degenerate into overt bragging.
This
is especially true when it comes to ambiguous skills, says Jennifer
Fremont-Smith, CEO of Smarterer, a Boston-based tech startup aimed at
helping IT applicants improve their resumes.
"People claim to have
things like, 'superior Internet skills.' What does that even mean?"
says Fremont-Smith. "I saw an application from a Web developer about a
month ago where he described himself as a 'rockstar in design tools,'
and an 'expert in developer tools.' That kind of inflated language
doesn't really tell your employer much about your skills."
Fremont-Smith
recommends carefully personalizing your cover letter to the employer
and listing the most relevant of skills for the job you want, and why
you want it. "The cover letter is the place to tell your story about why
it is that you're the right person for the company," she says. "It's
about really crafting a narrative that answers the question of why the
employer should talk to you."
8. Wrong Company Name/Wrong Cover Letter
Talk about mistakes that are easy to avoid.
"The
biggest mistake I see on a regular basis is that candidates either
misspell the name of the company or get the name wrong," says Gary
Hewing of Houston-based Bert Martinez Communications LLC. "If it's a
small misspelling like 'Burt' instead of 'Bert', I'd be willing to
overlook that. But the big, unforgivable mistake is when someone copies
and pastes a cover letter without the name or address to the correct
company. That, to me, is someone who's lazy and not paying attention."
Hewing
says sometimes it's hard to tell if a cover letter was meant for a
particular job, even if the candidate got the company name and position
right, if they talk about disconnected experience without explaining
themselves.
"We're a sales organization, but at least twice a
month, we'll get a cover letter with someone talking about their banking
background instead of sales," says Hewing. "It's a complete disconnect
to the job description and it doesn't even explain if the candidate is
seeking a career change. It tells me that they're just not paying
attention."
9. Cultural Preferences
Job
hunting is often compared to dating: It's about finding the right match;
and success hinges on staying cool under pressure and masking anxieties
to appear confident instead of desperate. But a few candidates take the
dating analogy too far, subjecting hiring managers to long lists of
personal likes and dislikes in cover letters.
"This one guy wrote
the first part of his cover letter talking about his interests like it
was an ad for an online dating site," Olson of Paradigm Staffing says,
about an applicant trying for a PR job. "He likes all types of music,
but 'never got into country.'"
While potentially charming to a possible mate, those tidbits are not helpful in a cover letter.
10. Jokes
Breaking
the ice with humor isn't necessarily a bad idea, but jokes in cover
letters are usually a turn-off for busy employers, say recruiters. It
might be better to save them for the interview, if they are to be used
at all. Olson recalled a candidate for a communications executive
position who rubbed an employer the wrong way with an off-color joke.
"She
decided in her interview, for some reason, to compare kids to Nazis,"
says Olson. "She thought she was being funny, but the interviewer
happened to be Jewish and didn't think she was very funny."
Recruiters
agree that it's best to stick with tried-and-true unfunny, but
effective conventional pitches about your education and work experience.
"The
thing with trying to be chummy and funny is that you lose credibility,"
says Gurney of Careerguy.com. "It looks desperate. And the worst thing
you can do in job-seeking is looking desperate or needy."
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